Vista upgrade question (I hear a groan...)

I have a Vaio VGN-FS195VP - about 3 years old. Currently as supplied with Win XP pro sp2. I have what looks like a virus problem (processor runaways, s l o w b o o t and most annoyingly severe audio distortion - tried eliminating Realplayer and 3rd party codecs etc)

I am running or have run ZA fw, AVG, Avast, CCleaner, Spybot, Trendmicro online av etc etc but so far no success in diagnosis. Before I get involved in a lengthy HijackThis/ registry tweaks process etc I thought I might just upgrade to Vista so that I have one non-critical box running it. My question is (I have mailed the vaio support website and am growing old waiting for an answer) what's the best way to make the change?

Can I upgrade XP with a reasonable certainty of trashing any viruses? In fact do Sony offer an oem upgrade to Vista option that retains Vaio fuctionality at all (indeed if they do is it worth having?). Why isn't this clear on their site??? Or did I miss it?

Or do I just buy the full function Vista Home version and forget that it's a Vaio? I don't really use the Sony utilities much but it might be useful to still retain Sony as a source of driver upgrades etc.

I'd appreciate any comments on any of the above.

 

I would not bother to upgrade to Vista on a 3 year old notebook. Chances are it will not run Aero, even if it has a gig of memory and its likely to be slow. The least painful thing to do is restore the system. If you want to play with something new try Ubuntu 7.04. at least you don't have to pay a bunch for it.

 

Yes it does have a gig of ram - is vista / aero that bloated?

 

I just thought that even running slow-ish it would give me a chance to familiarise myself with this latest imposition from ms.

 

It isn't bloated. It requires some graphics shader hardware that only the more recent computers have.

 

What's the best way to check this for certain?